


i'll see you with your laughter lines

by hellebored



Series: i'll see you with your laughter lines [1]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24226069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellebored/pseuds/hellebored
Summary: If Finnick were just a little too ugly for the rest of the world, Annie wouldn't mind.(Post-70th/pre-75th games.)
Relationships: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair
Series: i'll see you with your laughter lines [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999978
Comments: 22
Kudos: 75





	i'll see you with your laughter lines

**Author's Note:**

> _i'll see you in the future when we're older  
>  and we are full of stories to be told  
> cross my heart and hope to die  
> i'll see you with your laughter lines._ ([x](https://youtu.be/8ccFSXgdv5U))

In Four, croaking frogs fill the lowlands around the estuary, and cricketsong blankets the sloping lawn below the back porch of Finnick's house.

It's too humid to be inside. Annie sprawls on the lawn in a lightweight dress the fashionably-minded in the Capitol would delicately refer to as _provincial_ for its tiny blue flowers and unrefined calico weave. Given the opportunity, they would make oblique pitying comments about Annie too: about the way she lies next to the great golden Finnick Odair, on her back with the grass-stained skirt of her dress ruched up to her thighs as if a hand has been between them, at ease and indolent like she belongs there.

Annie's fingers lazily hook around Finnick's pinky. Even that small connection makes it easier for her to close her eyes: it's an anchoring touch, not a clinging grip, a distinction Finnick's other lovers have generally failed to appreciate. They aren't like Annie, who doesn't suffer from a greed-fueled worry that tomorrow somebody will steal his affection away. What Annie gets from him isn't something anyone can buy and she knows it.

She turns on her side and regards him in the early evening light. The sleepiness from drowsing in afternoon sun has cleared from her freckled face and left a pensive expression in its wake.

"Sometimes I wish you weren't so handsome," Annie says abruptly.

It's a strange statement coming from her. All of Panem talks about Finnick's body but Annie never says a word about it: not when she licks her thumb and rubs away mascara that's fallen below his lashes; not when he's in some gossip feature wearing clothes that look as tight as they feel in uncomfortable places; not when he comes in from the sea with the taste of salt in the short stubble he never grows in the Capitol. She'll comment on the salt, the clothes, the makeup, but not the body underneath.

(The entire world has an opinion about every inch of Finnick and how it might look or perform in bed, but all Annie seems to care about at the end of the day is that he showers and puts on a pair of flannel boxers his wardrobe stylist would throw out in an instant. Annie likes them because they're soft against her skin.)

Instead of trying to puzzle out where she's coming from, Finnick merely shrugs good-naturedly.

"I don't really mind it, being handsome," he says, and just like he'd intended, Annie shakes her head and rolls her eyes until she's staring straight up at the sky, amused by his vanity: the perfect setup for him to teasingly add, "and I don't think _you_ mind either."

Immediately Annie blushes, looking slightly uncomfortable, and the fingers around his pinky shift so she can hold his hand. "I'd still love you if you weren't. Even if you were ugly as an old dog, missing half your teeth, with a scar from here to here—" she traces from above his eye down to the edge of his lip, "— that forces you to wear an eyepatch not to scare the children."

The corner of Finnick's mouth quirks. "Like Patrick."

"Exactly like Patrick," she says, giggling.

"You have something you want to tell me, Annie?" Finnick accuses, tugging her over him in a half-roll that's rewarded with a shriek of laughter. He tangles a hand in her hair and draws her down until their noses touch: the flushed face hovering over his reveals that Annie, fey and fearsome in ways that no one else seems to see, is very pleased with herself. She folds her elbows across the broadness of his shoulders and settles on his chest with her chin on her hands.

"I do, Finnick Odair. If I woke up tomorrow to find you'd switched bodies with Patrick, the Capitol could have him with all your looks and I'd marry the Patrick-you and live in your smelly old fishmonger's shack by the beach."

That _shack_ is a leaky rotting hovel Patrick shovels sand and dead jellyfish out of after every storm, but Finnick thinks if he moved in there with Annie while Patrick left for the penthouses of the bored and wealthy, Finnick would still be getting the better end of the deal.

Curling his lip into a teeth-revealing sneer, Finnick takes on a heavy drawl: _"you Capitol folk don't know nothing 'bout fishin' do ya? Them crab pots, you best be careful or crabs'll reach through an' snip your fingers straight off. Sturgeon ain't none too friendly neither."_

"Ohhh," Annie says, the word bubbling with laughter, "I would _love_ to see Flickerman making the best of the new you."

Flickerman isn't the only one who'd have to make the best of a new him, and _god_ that makes him want to laugh. His clientele — does Patrick even have a bedroom voice? Is there _anyone_ in the world who'd want to hear it?

"Sold to the highest bidder: _come over here an' I'll spank ya,_ " he croaks in his best craggy Patrick voice, and Annie dissolves into giggles. "Fuck, Annie. Snow would lose his shit."

(It feels like a small victory, managing to joke without that tightness in his throat that makes Annie's eyes glint like she's two rash decisions from throwing her trembling body between him and the Capitol. She's already a levee for all the good in him; if she tries to hold back the sea from the other direction, to stop all the bad, she'll break.)

Quite suddenly, Annie's face turns somber. "He'd either think you'd gone mad or were pretending — either way we'd pay for it. But it'd be worth it. I'd die happy if you were free."

"Hmm. That's a sticking point for me, unfortunately."

"You being free, or me dying happy?"

"Tell you what." His lips briefly press into a small, teasing smile. "You're going to die a wrinkly old crone, Annie, and if you're not happy about it that's your problem."

Perhaps sensing the tension under his words, Annie lifts herself up on her forearms and stares down at him.

"You want me to grow old," she says slowly, "but it's not about how long I live, you know? That doesn't have anything to do with how happy I am. I want you to be _free_ , Finn. To me your freedom's worth more than my life."

"It's not," Finnick says, willing his tone and expression to be gentle, but inside he's screaming: he hates it when she gets like this, hates the resulting fear in him that swallows every inch of his body in a cresting wave of panic like nothing else in his life.

(Finnick can't protect her if she doesn't agree to be protected. Sometimes, when the vaulted ceilings above expensive sheets that aren't his own start to bear down and suffocate him in the loneliest hours before dawn, he finds a certain degree of comfort in the impossibility of escape. The only thing keeping Annie safe is her belief that there's absolutely nothing she can do to free him.)

"You've said you'd die to keep me from the Capitol." Annie brushes a short sideburn-curl behind his ear; it doesn't stay there. "I'm not allowed to feel the same way about you?"

Looping an arm around her waist, Finnick tugs her further up his body and finds her lips. "No," he says, resolute against the curve of her mouth, and Annie lets out an exasperated sigh before curling her palm against the back of his skull and tilting into the kiss.

"I love you, but you're the worst," she says, sounding overly-aggrieved on the surface, and possibly a little genuinely sad underneath: there's a dimple showing on her cheek all the same. "The worst. You really are."

(Annie, sweet brave Annie, who struggles to let go of so many things — the thundering sound when the faucet is on too high in the bath, the screams of children playing tag on the beach — lets go of this because he needs her to.)

"Not what you said last night," Finnick replies smoothly, and along his jaw Annie mutters something in response that he thinks might be _fuck you, Odair,_ and _oh,_ that sounds good in her voice.

—

"You know," she says sometime later, her weight still pleasantly draped over his chest, "I once saw Patrick stick his fingers under his eyepatch and sort of fish around—"

"Annie," Finnick interrupts in a polite, polished tone that hides exactly no part of the way his skin suddenly wants to crawl off his body, "I will give you all the gold I've ever owned in my life for you not to say whatever you're about to say."

"...there was something _in_ there, and he took it out—"

_"Annie."_

"—and ate it."

"Fuck— god. _God_ , just— _no_ , can you _not_ —"

"It was a cookie, I think? The hard ginger kind Sally makes? And I was thinking, y'know—"

"I swear to god, Annie Cresta: I'm a man of my word and I'll _throw_ you off the pier."

Annie stops talking. The crickets suddenly seem very loud: for a long half-minute she pulls her lips in tightly between her teeth like she's trying to keep some living creature from escaping her mouth. The gleam in her eyes starts to fade, and for a moment Finnick thinks he's safe, that it's over, and then—

"If _you_ were Patrick—"

Finnick hauls Annie up with him as he stands, and through the moon-dappled dark starts to pick his way down toward the beach: stumbling over wiry roots of salal twisting across the sandy path, with Annie flailing from helpless, unrepentant laughter over one shoulder.

∆


End file.
